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Alkor Zephyr
Overview Alkor Zephyr is an odd little planet in the Medusa Cascade that probably shouldn't exist. Its system contains eight stars, but because one of them is a pulsar, it only has seven visible suns. The natives are well aware that the eighth is there, however, and the effects of its constant radiation bombardment can be felt in the form of increased incidences of madness among the native populace. The seven visible suns can be destructive in their heat and contradictory gravitational pulls, but they are also the source of light and life as well, and as such hated, feared, and revered. Oaths by the seven suns are oaths on the source of life and death. The eight sun grants only madness, and a swear by the eighth sun is either an observation that the situation has gone beyond the realms of sanity, or an indication of something darker. Between the gravitational effects of eight suns, the radiation of the pulsar, and an extreme axial tilt of the planet itself, it's a wonder that Alkor Zephyr manages to support any life at all, but there is, in fact, a thin band between the dead dust regions at the equator and the ice plains to the south. It is here that the Iraklia, a robot race whose origins have been lost to the mists of time, manage to survive. The oceans also support a wide variety of life, most of it quite dangerous. The planet is highly unstable, geologically, and much of it is buffeted by extreme weather at any given time. Volcanic activity is also very common, and the north is dominated by magma barrens that will sometimes spit-forth flaming chunks of semi-molten rock that can land miles distant, reaching, at the worst times, as far south as the kingdoms of the Iraklia. Thanks to Alkor Zephyr's unusual gravitational alignments and the interplay of the solar radiation on the planet's magnetic fields, the sky from the planetary surface is often surprisingly beautiful, as even during daytime, and even on the equator, light interplays with magnetics to produce a rainbow shimmer that permeates everything. Unfortunately, this does not save the surface itself from being very dreary in most regions. Alkor Zephyr has three moons, though these are largely unremarkable, being little more than barren chunks. Two are rather small, but the third is somewhat larger than Earth's moon, relative to the planet Zephyr. This means that when it is reflecting light from the seven visible suns, it can be a rather spectacular sight. The Iraklia are spindly and wear very muted colors. The joints are large and rounded, but protected. They are humanoid in shape, a bit taller compared with the 'normal' Transformer scale, have four optics (two on each side - a full sized set, and a smaller set above them), no noses, and mouths that rarely do anything but frown. The Iraklia society is overall a peaceful one - they're generally much too busy battling the elements to worry about battling each other. However, as previously mentioned, thanks to the large amounts of radiation in the system, insanity is more common than it should be, and some of the people affected go off into the wilds and become violent brigands, preying on travelers, hunters, and smaller settlements. Sometimes these brigands even band together, becoming a larger threat. It is to deal with such as these that the warrior class exists, where stable and promising youths are raised to protect the Iraklia from the outsiders who are no longer a part of their society. Other forms of insanity are less extreme, sometimes resulting in milder hallucinations and 'visions.' Sometimes these 'visions' seem to prove to be something more than radiation-induced fancy, however, as events in life start to mirror things predicted in dream uncomfortably. This form of insanity is most common among the elders, who have been exposed to the living conditions of the system for the longest, and those who 'suffer' in this way are often revered as prophets. Not everything spouted by such an elder is going to happen down the road - sometimes a hallucination is just a hallucination - and at times the prophesies are cryptic, and cannot be fully understood until after they've passed. There are rumors that the walls of reality on Alkor Zephyr are unusually thin, bringing that world much closer to the Fifth, the Transformer Land of the Dead, than the rest of the universe is. Some say it is this, and not the influence of the local pulsar, that is the source of such a prophetic and doom-oriented culture. Also notable in their recorded prophesies is a time of darkness, when all eight of their stars are blotted out. This is notable because the suns, as viewed from the planet at the time it was discovered, showed that they were approaching a full alignment. It's much easier to block out seven overlapping starts than seven stars scattered about the sky. While the Iraklia are not a violent people, they are suspicious of outsiders, ever fearful for the doom that will fall from the skies, and tend towards the dour and joyless. Welcomes will be cold, if at all, and it is difficult to gain aid or earn the trust of these individuals. Not impossible, but the Iraklia face so many problems from the world around them that they are inclined to expect any new thing arrives to be something dangerous, something harmful. The Iraklia don't hope for "lucky breaks." They don't believe them. They don't even have a phrase for "good luck" in their vocabulary, so if strangers are showing up out of no where, it must be trouble. The Iraklia survive primarily by farming solar energy, but it has been observed that once the energy is in their system and processed, it can be used as fuel by Cybertronian lifeforms. Many would find fuel gained by such a source distasteful, to say the least. For some curious reason, the Iraklia speak a somewhat antiquated form of Decepticon. History As stated above, little is known of the history of the Iraklia. Their origins have been lost in the mists of time, due, largely, to the fact that their environment makes proper record-keeping a difficult proposition at best. On occasion, the pulsar's generated radiation gets processed by radio receivers as voice, usually interpreted as a series of random numbers. Space farers who have gone to investigate these transmissions often never returned. Even experienced pilots have difficulty navigating the eight large gravity wells of Alkor's system, making crashing very likely and leading to the region becoming something of the space equivalent to Earth's Bermuda Triangle. Recently, missions by both the Autobots and the Decepticons to investigate the transmission have managed to return successfully. The Decepticon mission even recovered one of their own, lost two years prior to the same mistakes that cost the lives of so many other space travelers. Investigations since then have suggested that Alkor Zephyr has far deeper ties to Cybertron and the Transformer species than initially suspected, but so far there's only theory and half-truths, nothing firm beyond the shared language of ancient Decepticon. Places Of Interest Middle Dust Plains "Interest" here is relative. The middle dust plains take up much of the planet, and are the location landed on by recent Autobot and Decepticon forays onto this world. However, for the most part the dust plains are miles and miles of nothing. Description: Nothing. There is nothing here but ground and sky, and even the ground barely deserves mentioning. Gray, cracked ground is packed tight, though not so tight as to keep the top layers from blowing about in the exceedingly heavy winds, some hot, some frigid. Looking around, there is no hint of life in this arid and inhospitable land. The sky, when it can be seen through the dust, is much more interesting. This system sports seven visible stars, but now, in a junction that occurs once in countless eons, the suns have aligned so that only indication that this world has more than one are the different colors flickering along the edges. Blue in the center, yellow beyond that, red on the edges, with other, more exotic hues bursting into life and before fleeing vision as quickly. It's difficult to tell what the light is bouncing off of, but as it reaches its fingers towards the edges of the sky it is reflected and refracted and recombined and split again, scattering shards of broken crystal colors across the cloudless firmament. It offers such stunning contrast to the lifeless gray of the planet that it's visually overwhelming, so that one almost misses the dark spot of a moon hanging halfway between the horizon and the sky-stars. Come to think of it, that moon seems a bit closer to the suns than it had a while ago... Kingdom of Iraklia The Kingdom exists along the small band of habitatal land that borders the Dust Plains to the south and the Ice Regions to the north. The word "Kingdom" is loosed here very loosely, as the Iraklia consist mostly of a few scattered towns, villages, and hamlets that don't war on themselves because they're too busy just surviving. There is no true central government, and local governing policies vary from community to community. Description: Despite the wretched heat in the north, the deep freeze in the south, and the frying radiation, intelligent life lives on Alkor Zephyr. In the south, closer to the cold than the heat, sits the kingdom of Iraklia, descended from the earlier kingdom of Lor. Small hamlets scatter the land. With eight suns, the common people tend to farm out solar cell ranches and solve most of their energy needs in that way. Glossy expanses of solar cells stretch out across the fields, and one may catch a glimpse of a native dusting the soot from the north off the cells to keep production peak. Along trade routes and rivers created by glacier melt, there are larger cities, where trade bustles. The natives seem a suspicious people, however, and are quite wary of strangers. It is as if they expect doom at every turn. Magma Barrens The region north of the Dust Plains, the Magma Barrens are, as yet, largely unexplored. However, their influence in times of geological instability can be felt a very long distance away, indeed. In the north, the tortured world of Alkor Zephyr literally cracks open and oozes its molten lifeblood, torn and crushed by the gravitic fields of its myriad stellar overlords. Magma washes over the land, incinerating any hopes of life in this area, save for a few aerial life forms that soar on the thermals rising off the liquid rock. The many suns bake this area mercilessly, and the nights are brief, due to the extreme axial tilt. As soon as a thin skin of rock starts to cool and solidify, the volcanoes and cracks ooze again, blasting forth more of their fiery insides. Thick soot chokes the air, reducing visibility considerably, and flying globs of lava make the area very treacherous, even to those so lucky as to fly. Oceans Alkor Zephyr's surface, like many worlds, is made up largely of ocean. However, this ocean is generally unexplored. The ocean floor drops off rather sharply, quickly giving away to dark depths that blot out even the eight suns. The mass of what is mostly water attenuates and lessens the effects of the radiation and heat that bake the surface of the world. Living in ignorance of the punishing lights above, fragile species survive in the ocean, some like delicate, branching ferns, resplendent in their fractal glory, but for each little wonder, there is a terror lurking in the deep, with needle-like teeth, grasping tentacles, poisonous spikes, or even electrical weapons. Creatures are constructed to tremendous sizes in the ocean, but their appetites outweigh them by far. Refuge Valley The Refuge Valley area consists, actually, of multiple valleys and the peaks that divide them. The peaks are the subject of almost constant storms, making flight among them (or even land based climbing) exceedingly difficult, something to be attempted by only the most skilled individuals. The valleys contain their own dangers, for while some medicinally useful plants can be found here that exist no where else in the universe, most plants are poisonous, and a few are mobile and/or carnivorous. On the edge of the dust plains the geography becomes more uneven as the geologically unstable lands throw up ever steeper hills and valleys. In the highest of the hilltops serves as a battlefield for the winds, where magma heated air from the north clashes with frigid, ice-cooled airstreams from the south. Here, both combatants throw sharp ice, boiling rain, and bursts of lightning against each other and everything that dares come near them. However, the highest hilltops shelter the deepest valleys, and in them, protected by the constant sky borne-violence overhead, lush, rich life forms can be found thriving off the electricity and moisture used as ammunition by the winds. The colors are more vibrant than anything that can be found in most this world, and almost match the glory of the shattered rainbow sky. Many of the plants seem metallic and segmented rather than organic, and others move almost with life of their own. Even in this relative refuge, however, all is not safe, for some of the plants move with a little too much life; for every spectacular, oversized flower there is a hidden thorn just as large; and for all that much of the local flora can be used for beneficial, healing purposes, it must first be processed, else it prove more poison than remedy. Nameless Town The references to "Nameless Town" has generated some confusion. In fact, most towns and hamelets in Iraklia have go unnamed, meaning that there are many places that can be called "Nameless Town." However, outsiders visiting Alkor Zephyr, after speaking with a local banished priest, assumed he was giving the specific name of his own town, rather then just generally implying that his town had no name. He was, in fact, referring to one of the towns with no name nearest to where he was found, a town without a name but containing an ancient temple worth noting. That said, asking any random native, "Where is Nameless Town?" is unlikely to yield any useful information. The particular town without a name referred to by the strange priest: Far enough south to guarantee short days thanks to the extreme axial tilt and far enough north to have a short growing season is a bleak and nameless town whose origins stretch back beyond the beginnings of recorded time. The stone-cut buildings are few, and fewer still are actually intact, as geological instability has cracked and shattered the construction material of choice many times over the centuries. Though the buildings are made of simple stone, they are all richly carved in a very ornate manner. Representations of the sky, the many suns, of herd animals being frightened by fire and cataclysm, of the earth tearing itself asunder and pouring out blood-magma, of ice cooling wounds and freezing all, and of the mysterious locals themselves, robots in smooth, rounded designs and muted colors, literally litter every exposed stone surface. The few intact buildings show themselves to be well constructed, carefully fit with small gaps in clever places to compensate for the instability in the area. In all, the town gives the impression of something just clinging to life, something whose grandest moments are far in the past. Still, it's incredible that any people could even survive out here, much less build structures as enduring as these. That this town is dying is no shock - it was dying the moment the first stone was laid. That it ever lived at all is the marvel. Temple of the Fifth (outside): From outside, the temple is an ancient, ruined building, huge stone pillars framing the entrance to this imposing structure. Part of the stonework has crumbled, but on the apex of the roof is carved a gigantic sphere radiating light, like the sun. Inside looks dark indeed. Temple of the Fifth (inside): Inside, the stonework of the temple is just as ruined as the outside. Several blocks have crumbled, but the main chamber is mostly clear of rubble. Carvings of robots litter the wall, as well as a repeated sun motif. The centre of the temple is strange. Where one would have expected an altar or pews is instead a circle of sycamore-looking trees, seemingly growing from the stone itself. In the middle is a medium-sized pool of an unidentifiable black oily substance. Lake of Sorrow A vast, frozen lake that figures heavily in some Iraklian tribes' culture. It says that if the fuel of the living is ever spilt on the lake, a great cataclysm will result, but just what shape that cataclysm is supposed to take is debated, and stories differe from tribe to tribe. Like a small inland sea, the vast Lake of Sorrow stretches out to the horizon. Dark, glossy black ice has frozen over the surface of the lake, strangling the waves and ripples, locking them away with thaw as their only hope. Looking closely at the ice, it seems that murky impurities have given it that brackish coloration, and the howling wind has polished it to a mirror-sheen. The wind seems mournful, or perhaps it howls a warning, and there is no cover to escape from the chill. The ice seems study enough to support one's weight, but one should tread lightly, all the same. One gets the feeling that more lurks under the lake than mere aquatic creatures. Above, the sky paints some amazing stellar vista that simply cannot lift the ashen mood of the lake. In this frigid region, the many suns can barely be seen, just a wan glow at the horizon, but they seem to be nearly stacking atop each other, when they can be seen. The sky, mostly consumed by night due to the axial tilt, often shows colorful meteor showers and vivid auroras, brought on by the horrific magnetic fields of this world, that dance in the sky like ghosts. Wreck of the Dark Comet S-10 The Dark Comet S-10 is the vessel once piloted by Fleet during the fateful scouting mission that brought him to Alkor Zephyr. While its wreck has only been in place for two years, it has already become the source of some superstitions among the Iraklians due to the strange voices that can be heard from the area. For the most part, those voices are normal Decepticon computer reports repeating navigation and damage warnings that are now quite useless. However, the ship sometimes speaks in another language, one it was not initially programmed in. This language has yet to be identified or translated. Fleet has reported that all attempts to silence the computers on his part have failed, and it is something of an oddity that the computer system should still have power after two years. The twisted wreckage of blackened spacecraft, alien to this alien world, stabs into the crystalline sky, the jagged remains of the hull like clawed fingers against the horizon. The black ice is thin here, and newer than the ruined ship. It's not yet overtaken the area completely, and the wound that the ship had gouged upon landing still clearly shows sharp-edged gray rocks disturbed beneath the thin layer of frigid dark soil. The wreckage itself, where re-entry and time hasn't blasted it black, is a somewhat dullish purple, marred on one of the hulls by a more livid shade of the same color, the stylized symbol of a knife-edged face glaring angrily at the world whose gravity dared touch it. A search of the wreckage shows neither survivor nor body, though every now in again the emotionless voice of the computer can be heard making course-adjustment recommendations that come too late for its missing crew. At least, that's what it's saying when it's speaking Cybertronian. What is being said when it slips into a second, less familiar language is anyone's guess. Ice Caves Far to the south are the volcanic ice caves, ever shifting as a result of the unstable geology of Alkor Zephyr. Fleet has reported that he would sometimes take refuge here when the radiation on the surface got too bad, but due to geologic instability, it is a refuge of limited use. In the south is a region of volcanic tunnels invaded and widened by ice, where dirty white twists around gray and black stone to produce a strange, marbling effect in caves that twist and branch and turn out and in on themselves. Between the abnormal magnetics of the world, the occasional rumbling of the underground caves, and the curves and curls that seem to test the boundary of sanity, it's nigh impossible to keep one's sense of direction straight down here. The only consistent "landmarks" are the occasional cavern, some unimaginably vast, and those only last until the next time the rumble of geological instability changes the pathways, brings down a ceiling, or reveals something new. It's not just the marble-ice paths themselves that twist about strangely, however, for sound itself echoes in unexpected ways. Things ahead sound like they are behind, things behind sound like they are above, and... surely that last rumble was just another smallplanet-quake? Because the size an actual object would have to be to make a noise like that... and what's with all that slithering? Notes * Alkor Zephyr, the descriptions, and the native society, were designed largely by player's Catechism and Fleetwind, but the planet, people, and all descriptions may be considered gifted to the MUSH, to do with as plot requires. In other words, Blueshift can stop asking Fleetwind whether or not she wants to blow it up now. Logs * Dead Air - While investigating a mysterious distress signal, the Transformers find a hostile planet. A stranger prophesies doom, while some of the Decepticons encounter a familiar face. * Right Back in Reichenbach - Nightbeat calls Red Alert out to the Reichenbach Falls to discuss a very serious conspiracy. Category:Planet